I'm going to give it a shot I think, will make backups of everything including Windows and I'm not going to try and force myself into Linux. However I will set myself some goals. I really like the look of Nobara because it was developed by Glorious Egg Roll and seems to be developed purpose built for gaming rather than some neckbeards slapping together various bits and claiming it's supported as is often the case unfortunately when it comes to open source then bitching at people who have the audacity to use it for gaming as advertised.
What sold me completely on Nobara was how easy the driver setup process was because that's something that completely drove me mad. Inevitably if you're just a simple end user very easy to cock up and you won't know if it's been done correctly or not. You've installed the wrong version of Nvidia driver desktop such and such 0.0551.4123.1313 now go back again. Yes I'm exaggerating but that's still very much what it's like sometimes.
Don't get any of that with Nobara, it detects your hardware plonks you into the update and lets you download what you need which is an absolute joy. Got my USB sticks now will be giving it a shot and if there are any special steps I have to do it I'll post them. The joke is my work related stuff should work fine out of the box but we'll see what happens.
Checklist tasks when installation done
. Remove password protection ( Never liked that feature, not relevant for me )
. Get brave running with previous bookmarks and passwords
. Install DeadBeef
. Install Nvidia drivers
. Play one very common mainstream game
. Render a backed up scene in Blender cycles
. Run Godot By The Gods project and playtest
. Record by the gods gameplay in OBS
. Sail the high seas and run a game
. See if Morrowind/New Vegas will run?
I haven't encountered an nvidia driver issue that didn't immediately fail and cause problems. If it affects your configuration, that sucks a ton, but on the upside it failed right away. All in all a much better problem than flakey WiFi drivers randomly dropping connections or your USB 3 ports being useless even for USB 2 or earlier.
The majority of stuff today either works or doesn't and that's really ideal, especially with that live image from which you install the OS. Can just do a pre-flight check with your preferred gear and make sure dmesg is clean before you commit.
I have honestly had less issues with my nvidia card, I mentioned it before but there was some AMD related issues, dunno if it was based on the motherboard but I recently checked the posts about the bug report again: people still have issues. It was a mess with stuff randomly crashing the driver and not being able to recover. I fixed it by going nvidia weirdly enough.
And yeah, that's imho the best positive you can just use a live-disk and test from there, have done that a lot before myself.